Lawsuit to Prevent Confederate Statues From Being Removed Heads Back to Georgia Courts

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
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By Joe Jurado, TheRoot.com

You know, you would think betraying your country and getting bodied for it hundreds of years ago would be enough to stop people from sympathizing with the Confederacy, but no. Instead, we’re in the year 2020, where a man in Georgia feels the need to file a lawsuit preventing the removal of two ugly-ass Confederate statues.

According to AJC, commissioners in Macon-Bibb County voted 5-4 on July 27 in favor of moving two Confederate statues from downtown Macon to outside a local cemetery. Not having any of that, Plaintiff Martin Bell filed his suit against the county. The suit initially had federal claims in it, but Federal Judge Hugh Lawson sent the suit back down to Bibb County Superior Court after Bell amended the suit to remove those claims.

Macon, Georgia, USA at the War Memorial to Confederate Soldiers.
Photo: Sean Pavone (Shutterstock)

Bell, for those curious, is state commander of the Military Order of the Stars and Bars Georgia Society Inc., an organization whose purpose boils down to “our ancestors were traitors in the name of slavery and dammit, we’re proud!”

Superior Court Judge Rucker Smith previously granted a temporary injunction to Bell that prevented the county from moving or letting “harm of any kind” come to the monuments. Now that the case is back in Macon-Bibb County, it’s unclear which judge will hear the case.

Bell states in the lawsuit that “the proposed moving of the Monuments is a racially-motivated action designed for political purposes to placate the mob mentalities current in American society.”

Wait, hold up, wasn’t the Confederacy a racially motivated mob, designed for political purposes to placate the needs of slave owners? So it’s fine when it comes to brutalizing Black bodies and killing your fellow countrymen, but not to moving monuments to make people feel more comfortable? Well goddammit, that’s just a bridge too far for you monsters.

Read the full article here.

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